Syria

“But now, let’s talk about the bad guys,” Brian Kilmeade began on a Fox and Friends segment called “World on Edge” this week. His guest was Gillian Turner, a former staffer on the National Security Council and associate at Jones Group International, who spent the segment discussing concerns over terrorism in Turkey and other parts of the Middle East.

I first saw the clip in the gym without sound or subtitle, so all I knew about what Ms. Turner said was what the screen infographic said Ms. Turner said:

Turner: Turkey must defeat Assad, then ISIS.

I was so floored by this description declaration that I was fully prepared to dismiss Ms. Turner as an know-nothing hack drummed up by the Fox and Friends crew. Then I went back to the actual video. In fact, Ms. Turner give a short, fair summary of the security issues facing Turkey with regard to the refugee crisis and terrorism, noting that the Turkish government considers (and treats) the PKK as terrorists and that the Turks are accepting refugees with no financial support. The account is, almost by necessity, a bit anodyne, but she also dodges the segment’s premise in terms of the situation in Turkey leading to terrorism in the United States. Nowhere in this account does she actually mention Assad.

Now, I could be misled by a short segment, but nothing in this segment indicated that Turkey should do anything against Assad, let alone doing so unilaterally while Assad is supported by Russia. Turkey has enough of a strained relationship with Russia right now over the violation of airspace and subsequent shooting down of a Russian fighter (Pravda’s most recent coverage, or do a google search).

This sort of manipulation probably happens all the time on cable News shows and is a form of doublespeak where, not only is there vague and euphemistic language, but there can be two disparate statements that are being conveyed at the same time, as Stephen Colbert used to show on his “The Word” segment. Yet, there is one big difference. In my opinion, these cable news shows are not meant to be consumed as an all-encompassing experience. The noisiness of the on-screen information may “add” to the experience of someone listening to the show with the volume on, but is actually designed for gyms, airports, and other public screens that might be tuned to the channel. These screens frequently won’t have even a closed caption, so the shows rely on flashing icons and the movement of the hosts to draw attention to the screen where there is an easily-digested, if misleading, talking point.

As a final, tangentially related point, it sometimes amuses me to watch the Fox and Friends hosts fidget as they try to keep from checking their smartphones, which are set immediately next to them on the couch. Screens are addictive, it isn’t just a young-person problem.

It is depressing to watch on Twitter as humanitarian disasters unfold, again and again and again. It happened in the Tahrir Square protests (and counterrevolution) in Egypt, with Ansar Dine in Mali, the original civil war in Syria, and ongoing refugee crisis. And many more; those were only the ones that have been most on my radar the past couple years. The abject suffering makes the American political discourse, such as holding reviews of Planned Parenthood’s budget without anyone from Planned Parenthood seem like a joke, even as it threatens to pull even more medical care from poor women. These are both rancid fruits, but on different scales. In Syria, a nation that had about 22 million people, there have been about ten million people displaced internally and externally, or about the same number of people executed in the Holocaust. I am not casting judgment, just putting the numbers in context. In a recent fit of helplessness, I donated some money to an organization that is supposed to help bring supplies and care to refugees from Syria.

Other people have done a much more thorough job than I can hope to do chronicling the conflict, including Thomas van Linge, a nineteen year old Dutch activist who compiles some of the best maps of the Syrian conflict currently available. However, I want to give just a bit of a overview in light of the news that Turkish tanks have moved into Cizre, a town in Turkey near the Syrian border. This will consist of nothing more than a list of groups involved and who they are ostensibly shooting at, and without the nuance of, for instance, differentiating between Syrian rebel groups.

The refugees are not leaving willy-nilly, but are fleeing a brutal conflict that is literally tearing apart the fabric of their home. Not of the nation state, the ship for which has sailed, but of their homes. The reason I’m posting this now is that Turkey has just stepped up its attacks, amid warnings that it, too, is facing a civil war, and the ceasefire between the military and the PKK has dissolved. Meanwhile, the US has sent warnings to Turkey that their airstrikes have been too close to where US soldiers have been training Kurdish Peshmerga. To make matters worse, this is a conflict that includes not just small-arms fire and roadside bombs, but tanks, drone and aircraft strikes, and chemical weapons and is taking place in the space around what used to be considered the Iraq-Syria border, but now obeys only the lines on the map that are enforced through force of arms. Everyone is seemingly shooting at everyone and millions of civilians have been caught in the cross-fire. At this point I have been watching it all unfold on Twitter for years.

Four books I once started, but didn’t finish…that I’d like to give another shot

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Four “resolutions” for 2014

Write more, in a variety of places (including here)

Cook more often and more adventurously

Spend less time dwelling on things beyond my control

Smile more often

I did not like 2013; for everything that went right in the year, it seemed that two things went wrong. Flipping the calendar to 2014 is an arbitrary milestone, but I am optimistic about this next chunk of time all the same. Noted above, one goal I have for this year is to write here more frequently, and I have a few topics on the back burner, though the only post I have planned for the near future is to revisit my list of top novels, which could appear as early as next week.

I have always loved maps. In fact, I had a pocket atlas of the world in middle school and was teased for “reading” it. But in a European tradition, maps are seductive, deceptive. They instill a sense of order and possession in the world that bear not resemblance to reality. Sure, sometimes the line is a simulacrum of a wall or a road or a river or a mountain, but in many instances that is an artificial creation; where the line is not man-made, it is wont to move,such as when a river changes course.[1]

There are other issues with maps, too. One West Wing episode features a petition from a group called Cartographers for social equality–a group dedicated to flipping the usual N-S paradigm because having north on top creates top-bottom attitudes. Likewise, the central panel of a map centralizes that landmass–usually the United States or Europe–in the viewer’s awareness. Then there are claims to ownership that the cartographer inscribes on the map, which gets us back to the issue of lines. The common practice in Ancient Greece was to place boundary markers (horoi) to denote borders of property (particularly rented or mortgaged property) and temple land.[2] Similar stones could denote the boundary of the chora that belonged to the town. There may also have been border watch posts or border forts along or near that border that would have extended a more physical presence along the border. Within the territory there was ownership of property, but on a state level the possession of territory was more about what the state could claim as its own and subsequently protect than any sort of “ownership” in the modern sense.

Lines that appear on maps showing the extent of territory in the ancient world are often problematic, but so too is replacing the lines with nodes. The key here is a multiplicity of forms of territory. Each city in Greece would have possessed its own chora, but the furthest border was rarely a line, even if there was a border of boundary stones. Control and borders of empires are even more problematic. We can drawn an outline of Alexander’s conquests, but in the furthest reaches of Bactria and in central India, those lines would have been meaningless. Territory was only possessed if it could be controlled–lines were only real if they had physical manifestations. This necessity led to an emphasis on urbanization by ancient state buildings (Seleucus and Antigonus among the successors to Alexander’s empire being classic examples). Sedentary peoples were easier to control than nomads and cities, or fortresses in some instances, offered a physical presence in the area. The Seleucid kingdom eventually reached a point where it was consisted of cities along the royal road, with each city having its own chora.

I wrote before that these fissures and cracks in the ancient world and how we think about it are where I see some ancient relevance to the modern world. Recently there have been some reports about the escalation of violence in Syria and Iraq and how the US withdrawal from Iraq has allowed “terrorist” groups to form actual camps without fear of airstrikes. In a radio story (apologies, I forget which NPR program this was on), the host asked the expert to clarify whether the camps were in Syria or Iraq and was told that the people involved did not recognize a border in the region. The United States and Western Europe are committed to a nation-state paradigm and territorial integrity for their own reasons, which is why there has been only a passing discussion of breaking up Iraq and Syria,[3] but it is easy to forget that the borders only exist in as much as there is collective agreement and are enforced. The jigsaw puzzle of the world map offers certainty and completion in the world and in some parts of the world that paradigm works, but in any number of other places the borders are just as illusory as the concept of the state that the borders are supposed to demarcate.

[1]The root of the English word “meander,” for instance, is the Maeandros River in Anatolia, a waterway notorious for wandering around the valley.

[2]The word also denotes other borders or memorials.

[3]If the United States was to support separatist movements without widespread international support (such as from the UN), then there would be precedent for other nations to support Hawaii in its separatist bid. Most nations have groups that would rather be independent, so unless there is a compelling reason (e.g. ethnic cleansing) for the region to be independent, there is a dearth of support for such groups on the international level.

In some ways the dominant legacy of colonialism is that the nation states formed since the withdrawal of the military and political attention of the colonial powers [1] are usually artificial constructions that more closely align to treaty boundaries between western powers than they do to any sort of natural boundary, be it geographic, ethnic, or otherwise. Despite ideological claims that democracy will create a peaceful and stable world, repressive military regimes in the Middle East actually created a more stable international scene. So the democratic revolutions in the Arab Spring were welcomed as the birth of democracy, particularly when it meant the overthrow of an anti-Western leader like Qaddafi.[2] Where the protests were against more stable (from the American point of view) leaders, the protests were more hesitantly supported.

In early 2011 the Arab Spring reached Egypt and interested peoples watched the demonstrations in Tahrir Square from streaming web cam. The protests ended with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and, eventually, Muhammed Morsi became the first civilian President of Egypt. Since that time a military coup has deposed Morsi, protests resumed, and violence escalated.

There have been some touching stories from the tragedies in Egypt, including neighbors of different religions helping each other out and the protection of Egyptian museums. I recall reading at the time that these stories and the reluctance of the military to fire upon protesters were indicative of Egypt’s uniqueness in the Arab world. Egypt was said to have a long tradition of “nationalism,” a national ride in Egyptian Heritage, and a geography that nullified many of the problems of tribalism possessed by other Arab states.

Of course this narrative could be exposed merely by pointing out that much of the Sinai is governed by Bedouin tribes and there is little to no government oversight of the peninsula. But that exception not withstanding, one need only point out that the Nile, even with its annual floods curtailed by the construction of the Aswan High Dam, is the constant thread between today, Napoleon trying to conquer the Orient, Crusaders facing ignominious defeat, Julius Caesar cavorting with Cleopatra, Alexander laying out the design for a massive city, the construction of the pyramids, and the settlement of a tribe of semi-nomadic pastoralists from the Levant at the behest of one mythical Joseph. With the Nile as a foundation, the long national unity of Egypt is a seductive notion. The problem is that it is another myth of national unity, a fiction of uniqueness that obscures another country dominated by a military establishment.

The story in Turkey is that the military would overthrow elected officials who threatened the secular republican legacy of Ataturk, although their opposition to Erdogan has been limited. The stated motivations for coups in Egypt are not nearly so Romantic. The Wikipedia page for Tahrir Square says that the protests went on long enough that the military (presumably the establishment, people such as al-Sisi) an opportunity to remove Mubarak. There was a brief experiment with democracy, but for this second round of protests the army has not been as reluctant to use violence. It seems that the Wikipedia page is on to something. Perhaps the reason that Egypt under Mubarak did not more resemble Syria under Assad is that individuals in the Egyptian military wanted to remove Mubarak themselves.

[1] This is not to say a complete removal of imperialism since former colonial powers frequently maintain an economic presence and interest in the former colonies. This economic imperialism can quickly turn into military force, particularly if the internationally recognized government requests assistance, as was the case in Mali last year.
[2] One of my favorite moments in the pilot of “The West Wing” is when Leo McGary calls the editor of the New York Times crossword to yell at him about using Qaddafi as one of the answers. This is one of the ways in which the pilot, in particular, dates itself. For another, there are also multiple jokes and appearances of pagers.

I know a number of people who can’t stand Danziger’s Cartoons (or politics), but I have had a long-running soft-spot for some of his dark observations about politicians, political campaigns, and foreign leaders. But I wanted to actually deconstruct this cartoon about Assad and Morsi because I think that it doesn’t work.

The target of this comic is Assad, not Morsi. As such, it is the latest in a long series of cartoons in which Danziger is critical Assad being allowed to kill thousands of citizens in Syria and the joke is that if Assad is allowed to murder thousands of citizens in order to keep power, then Morsi should take a hint and do the same thing. Now that the joke has had any trace of dark humor flogged from it, I need to point out that the joke falls flat because, unlike the best observations Danziger makes, it shows no trace of awareness about the situation in that part of the world. Instead, it seems to have taken the casualty count from the civil war in Syria, the headline that Morsi was resisting protests, and a wise-crack that maybe Morsi ought to use military force to suppress the protests.

But Morsi was overthrown by the Egyptian military, led by General al-Sisi, a man who considers himself an heir to Nasser.[1] In the wake of Morsi’s ouster, Assad praised the Egyptian military for removing him, saying: “Whoever brings religion to use for political or factional interests will fall anywhere in the world.” He draws a comparison between the Syrian opposition and Morsi’s government, suggesting (unfortunately not without a shred of truth) that he (and the army) is ruling a secular government and protecting religious minorities. Like in Turkey, the army in Egypt receives credit for ensuring secular government and stands apart from a government that leans toward one religious denomination or another. So Morsi never had control of the army and had its support for only a short time. Danziger’s joke targets Assad, but brings in Morsi even though their situations were nothing alike. The better comparison to Assad was Mubarak and could potentially be al-Sisi, but Mubarak is gone and al-Sisi is not (yet) a target. And then there are differences between Syria and Egypt in terms of ethnic and geographic makeup.

[1] The army has been saying that they are acting on behalf of the Egyptian protesters (who they may have incited) and limiting the power of the Muslim Brotherhood. But, to put it cynically, the problems that prompted the protests against Morsi’s administration were largely the same problems that prompted protests against Mubarak’s administration. I do not know what, if anything, Morsi’s government did to fix those problems, but anyone who supports democratic governments should be watching Egypt with some concern. Conversely, the past few years have been hopeful for democracy in Turkey in that the military has allowed top officers to be arrested and have not overthrown the Erdogan government. Of course, the result in Turkey has been massive protests met with curfew, tear gas, and arrests by the police.

Temple and Sacred Vessels from Biblical Times Discovered at Tel Motza– A temple complex from the kingdom of Judah was found outside of Jerusalem, including walls and sacred vessels and pottery figurines have been discovered. This is one of the few sites from the period of the first temple now known to have possessed an independent temple complex, and is even more remarkable for its proximity to Jerusalem. The archaeologists have suggested that this site corresponds to the biblical Mozah, a town in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin bordering on Judea and perhaps supplying grain for Jerusalem (silos were found). The article includes further discussion of assemblages found at the site.

A real look at being a professor in the US-CNBC published a list of least stressful jobs in the US, placing “university professor” at number one. Actual tenured faculty members (let alone adjuncts and graduate students) have not been taking the “honor” well. This is an evaluation of the life of one university professor seeking to debunk the notion that being a university professor is low-stress. I am sure that the other careers on the list have similar objections, but midway through graduate school (i.e. several more years to go without the guarantee of a real job at the end) I am sympathetic to the author of this reaction.

A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins– From the New Yorker, the life and career developments of a professional (and legal) pickpocket. The article mostly follows his career, but talks about the technique and recent interest in the neurological science behind pick pocketing and the where people focus their attention.

Angry Panama– A feature in the Economist that looks at the unbalanced economic growth in Panama and the civil unrest that is taking place as a result.

Atheism and Islam– An article in the Economist that uses a trial and riot in Indonesia against an atheist in order to discuss some of the other laws and prejudices against atheism throughout the Muslim world.

Turkey requested NATO missile defenses over Syria chemical weapons fears– Several weeks ago Turkey requested Patriot missiles to protect against potential Syrian air and missile strikes against their towns. Now it appears that there is intelligence that there has been an uptick in activity at Syrian chemical facilities and that the Assad regime is contemplating the use of ballistic missiles and chemical warheads against the rebels if traditional airstrikes do not work.

A Tsunami in Switzerland– New geological findings provide evidence that Gregory of Tours documented an actual event in recording a wall of water on Lake Geneva in 563 CE. The study discovered a massive deposit of sediment in the middle of the lake, likely put there by massive rock fall into the silt near the mouth of a river.

Gaza– A thoughtful consideration of the many problems with the Gaza-Israel issue. In short: there are no good guys in this issue.

Syrian Rebels Have Lost Their Innocence– A story in Spiegel that discusses the violence in Syria. In short, what was once seen as relatively one sided violence perpetrated by the Assad regime has devolved into violence perpetrated by both sides. Promises of war crimes trials after the regime change seem less and less likely the longer violence continues.

Turkish Call For Help Puts Germany in a Tough Spot– An article in Spiegel that discusses a recent call for NATO aid in setting up patriot missiles along the Turkish border with Syria after mortar fire landed in Turkey. Commentators says both that this would be a slippery slope toward German involvement in Syria and that Germany is somewhat willing to aid Turkey–and can’t refuse the request.

Can Syria’s Fractious Opposition be Melded into One?– A story in the Economist about Syria and the divisions within the rebel forces. In particular, it focuses on western powers refusing to aid the rebels until they have a unified leadership. The author seems doubtful that anything will come of it and, while the west has cause to want a single leadership as to avoid anarchy, there may need to be a multi-state solution.

Syria in Ruins– A visual account of the war in Syria on the Atlantic. Everyone should see these pictures.

Mali and Al Qaeda – Can the Jihadists be Stopped– An account of the UN plans for intervention in Mali, which will be led by Malian and African troops. They are expecting that the intervention force will be able to at least retake the main cities. Unfortunately, this seems to be a band aid for underlying problems, including both a weak central government and disgruntled Tuaregs such that it might end an al-Qaeda led separatist state, but the local unrest will remain.

Why White Women Voted For Romney– A story in the New Yorker that looks at the demographics of the election. The author points out that saying that Obama and the Democrats win the women’s vote is misleading. Educated women, much like educated men, tend to skew liberal, but women are also closer to representative of their racial category (talking about polling data here, not what these mean…I don’t make up the categories), albeit to a lesser extent. White women, like white men, tend to vote conservative overall.

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About

Welcome to my blog. Although the host is new, the blog is not--the first post went up in January 2008.
I write about a variety of topics here including, but hardly limited to, baking, books, movies, historical topics, and politics. This is a catchall for a range of topics, particularly those that are not part of my research portfolio.